For those who wish to learn more about the background of
The House of Dead Maids, I have written a number of web pages
dealing with my research into the Brontë family and Wuthering
Heights. You may reach all of those pages by clicking on this
link.
The Haworth Cemetery
The Haworth cemetery is only a few feet from the
house where the Brontës lived.
As you can tell from this headstone, the graves
were reopened to admit new family members, and the new names and
dates were added below the old ones. The Brontës could hear the
endless tapping of stonecutters working on the headstones from morning
till night.
The Haworth cemetery is the graveyard Tabby refers
to at the end of the book.
Patrick Brontë had the trees planted to aid Haworth's
sanitation; this crowded graveyard is on top of the highest point
in town, and its corpses were fouling the groundwater. When Tabby
came to work for the Brontës, there were no trees.
The wonderful English moss almost seems to glow
on a gloomy day.
I love the mist. This was the middle of the day,
and the middle of May, too (around the same time as Tabby's adventure).
All photographs copyright 2009 by Joseph
R. Dunkle
